Working four days instead of five for the same pay increases employee happiness without compromising company productivity. This is the recently reported result of a four-day workweek test conducted over the six months from June to December 2022, involving 61 UK companies with a total of around 2,900 employees. bottom.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers experienced increased stress and burnout, a state of extreme fatigue that makes it difficult to meet work goals. “This is a huge problem,” says independent organizational psychologist and consultant Michael His Writer. He is not involved in the new report. “Especially in healthcare, where I do a lot of work. It makes it much harder to retain talented people.” of companies say they find it difficult to hire new employees and retain existing employees. But raising awareness of burnout and its associated problems can have a positive effect, Reiter adds. “People are demanding more changes in how work is organized,” he says.
In response to this demand, independent research organization Autonomy is working with advocacy groups 4 Day Weeks Global and 4 Day Weeks Campaign, as well as researchers from the University of Cambridge, Boston College, and other institutions to help companies reduce costs. published a report on what would happen if number of working days in a week. A survey of participants found that 71% of his respondents reported reduced levels of burnout, and 39% reported feeling less stressed than when they started the test. Employers saw a 65% reduction in sick and personal days. Also, the number of retirees has fallen by more than half compared to the first six months. The company’s earnings changed little during the test period, even though employees worked fewer hours. In fact, they increased slightly, on average he increased by 1.4%.
Even before the COVID pandemic hit, companies were looking to enhance employee benefits through interventions such as wellness programs. A new report suggests that a four-day workweek could be a tool for this purpose. “We believe this is a much more effective and powerful way to influence employees,” said Juliette Scholl, an economist and sociologist at Her College in Boston, co-author of the report. . Unlike most wellness benefits and flexible time schedules, which are typically individual options, a four-day week becomes an organization-wide policy. As a result, making that change won’t hurt workers’ career prospects or earnings, Schor said.
When it comes to helping workers in distress, Reiter says, “more effort goes into making them feel better than actually changing the nature of work.” “Such results [the researchers are] Reports are more substantive than many of them [wellness] program. Because, again, a lot of what these programs are doing is helping people cope with the current situation, not change. [that situation]Changing the nature of work is much more important than helping people put up with what they have. “
This isn’t the only time a shorter workweek will be tested. For example, in 2008 the State of Utah began a program to close the offices of state employees on Fridays to save on building energy costs, but in this program employees continued to work 40 hours a week and then reduced those hours to 5 hours. It just redistributed to 4 days instead of 1 day. Other researchers have investigated the number of weeks or days of work, but he often included workers in only one organization in these assessments. “Before 2022, 4 Day Week Global started testing for companies with four-day workweeks … To our knowledge, there were no studies of multiple companies with four-day workweeks,” he said. Schor says. The organization has conducted multiple studies on the effects of shortened weeks in other countries.
In addition to the study, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with the new report’s participants. From these interviews, it became clear that employees use the additional days off primarily for organization and day-to-day operations. This allowed me to book my weekends primarily for recreation, allowing me to spend time with my family and my hobbies.
The tests included companies from various industries, including online retailers, financial services firms, animation studios, and fish and chip shops. Each company chose to implement a four-day work week. For example, make Friday a holiday for everyone, or allow employees to choose any holiday. Research also found that participants were able to save time by eliminating time wasters such as lengthy meetings. He said 92% of the companies participating in the pilot program would continue the four-day week test, and 18 companies decided to keep the reduced working hours on a permanent basis.
Because the six-month testing period was relatively short, it is unclear whether the positive health effects are long-lasting. Employees may become accustomed to working shorter hours over time, and the shorter weekly hours will have a limited impact on stress levels. The researchers plan to conduct a follow-up study on participating companies that maintain a four-day workweek in year one to see if these positive results continue. “One of the reasons we think it will be is because she’s done interim research on all of this,” she says. Key outcomes such as stress and burnout “improved in the first three months of her life, and the improvement was maintained. So it was clear that no regression was seen from three months to her six months.” I already know.”
Leiter would have liked the team to use more established scales to assess burnout. In the survey, Gold is now considered the standard Masrach He Burns Out. Rather than using an inventory-like assessment, he asked questions related to fatigue and frustration, he explains. “The colloquial idea of burnout is being tired and feeling really unsatisfied with your job,” he says. he points out. “Burnout has that quality, but it’s also very cynical, discouraging, makes things impersonal, and really loses your sense of accomplishment. This is a much darker place.” A four-day work week is likely to relax this stricter definition of burnout, he said.
Employers may see the success of new work-from-home policies and be more willing to experiment with four-day workweeks. “When companies switched to working from home because of the pandemic, this is what they had the technology to do from the beginning and they were really reluctant to let people do it,” he said. say. “So it really changed the perspective of employers. I think it opened their minds.” “I think people were in a rut about how work needed to be organized,” he says. “What a lot of people got out of the pandemic was the reflection that ‘it really doesn’t have to be’. We can change things dramatically.
The first version of this article was science spectrum Reproduced with permission.
